I remember how very late one night I went up to the promenade deck to
smoke a cigar before turning in. It was a warm moonlight night. The
broad low waves of ebony water that went seething past below, foamed
luminous and were streaked and starred with phosphorescence. The
recumbent moon, past its full and sinking westward, seemed bigger than I
had ever seen it before, and the roundness of the watery globe was
manifest about the edge of the sky. One had that sense so rare on land,
so common in the night at sea, of the world as a conceivable sphere, and
of interstellar space as of something clear and close at hand.
There came back to me again that feeling I had lost for a time in
Germany of being not myself but Man consciously on his little planet
communing with God.
But my spirit was saying all the time, "I am still in my pit, in my pit.
After all I am still in my pit."
And then there broke the answer on my mind, that all our lives we must
struggle out of our pits, that to struggle out of our pit is this life,
there is no individual life but that, and that there comes no escape
here, no end to that effort, until the release of death. Continually or
frequently we may taste salvation, but never may we achieve it while we
are things of substance. Each moment in our lives we come to the test
and are lost again or saved again. To be assured of one's security is to
forget and fall away.
And standing at the rail with these thoughts in my mind, suddenly I
prayed....
I remember how the engine-throbs beat through me like the beating of a
heart, and that far below, among the dim lights that came up from the
emigrants in the steerage, there was a tinkling music as I prayed and a
man's voice singing a plaintive air in some strange Slavonic tongue.
That voice of the invisible singer and the spirit of the unknown
song-maker and the serenity of the sky, they were all, I perceived, no
more and no less than things in myself that I did not understand. They
were out beyond the range of understanding. And yet they fell into the
completest harmony that night with all that I seemed to understand....
§ 8
The onset of New York was extraordinarily stimulating to me. I write
onset. It is indeed that. New York rides up out of the waters, a cliff
of man's making; its great buildings at a distance seem like long
Chinese banners held up against the sky. From Sandy Hook to the great
landing stages and the swirling hooting traffic of the Hudson River
there fails nothing in that magnificent crescendo of approach.
And New York keeps the promise of its first appearance. There is no
such fulness of life elsewhere in all the world. The common man in the
streets is a bigger common man than any Old World city can show,
physically bigger; there is hope in his eyes and a braced defiance. New
York may be harsh and blusterous and violent, but there is a breeze from
the sea and a breeze of fraternity in the streets, and the Americans of
all peoples in the world are a nation of still unbroken men.
I went to America curious, balancing between hope and scepticism. The
European world is full of the criticism of America, and for the matter
of that America too is full of it; hostility and depreciation
prevail,--overmuch, for in spite of rawness and vehemence and a scum of
blatant, oh! quite asinine folly, the United States of America remains
the greatest country in the world and the living hope of mankind. It is
the supreme break with the old tradition; it is the freshest and most
valiant beginning that has ever been made in human life.
Here was the antithesis of India; here were no peasants whatever, no
traditional culture, no castes, no established differences (except for
the one schism of color); this amazing place had never had a famine,
never a plague; here were no temples and no priesthoods dominating the
lives of the people,--old Trinity church embedded amidst towering
sky-scrapers was a symbol for as much as they had of all that; and here
too there was no crown, no affectations of an ancient loyalty, no
visible army, no traditions of hostility, for the old defiance of
Britain is a thing now ridiculous and dead; and everyone I met had an
air as if he knew that to-morrow must be different from to-day and
different and novel and remarkable by virtue of himself and such as
himself.
I went about New York, with the incredulous satisfaction of a man who
has long doubted, to find that after all America was coming true. The
very clatter pleased me, the crowds, the camp-like slovenliness, a
disorder so entirely different from the established and accepted
untidiness of China or India. Here was something the old world had never
shown me, a new enterprise, a fresh vigor. In the old world there is
Change, a mighty wave now of Change, but it drives men before it as if
it were a power outside them and not in them; they do not know, they do
not believe; but here the change is in the very blood and spirit of
mankind. They breathe it in even before the launch has brought their
feet to Ellis Island soil. In six months they are Americanized. Does it
matter that a thing so gigantic should be a little coarse and blundering
in detail, if this stumbling giant of the new time breaks a gracious
relic or so in his eager clutch and treads a little on the flowers?
§ 9
And in this setting of energy and activity, towering city life and
bracing sea breezes, I met Gidding again, whom I had last seen departing
into Egypt to look more particularly at the prehistoric remains and the
temples of the first and second dynasty at Abydos. It was at a
dinner-party, one of those large gatherings that welcome interesting
visitors. It wasn't, of course, I who was the centre of interest, but a
distinguished French portrait painter; I was there as just any guest. I
hadn't even perceived Gidding until he came round to me in that
precious gap of masculine intercourse that ensues upon the departure of
the ladies. That gap is one of the rare opportunities for conversation
men get in America.
"I don't know whether you will remember me," he said, "but perhaps you
remember Crete--in the sunrise."
"And no end of talk afterwards," I said, grasping his hand, "no end--for
we didn't half finish. Did you have a good time in Egypt?"
"I'm not going to talk to you about Egypt," said Gidding. "I'm through
with ruins. I'm going to ask you--you know what I'm going to ask you."
"What I think of America. It's the same inevitable question. I think
everything of it. It's the stepping-off place. I've come here at last,
because it matters most."
"That's what we all want to believe," said Gidding. "That's what we want
you to tell us."
He reflected. "It's immense, isn't it, perfectly immense? But---- I am
afraid at times we're too disposed to forget just what it's all about.
We've got to be reminded. That, you know, is why we keep on asking."
He went on to question me where I had been, what I had done, what I made
of things. He'd never, he said, forgotten our two days' gossip in the
Levant, and all the wide questions about the world and ourselves that we
had broached then and left so open. I soon found myself talking very
freely to him. I am not a ready or abundant talker, but Gidding has the
knack of precipitating my ideas. He is America to my Europe, and at his
touch all that has been hanging in concentrated solution in my mind
comes crystallizing out. He has to a peculiar degree that directness
and simplicity which is the distinctive American quality. I tried to
explain to his solemnly nodding head and entirely intelligent eyes just
exactly what I was making of things, of the world, of humanity, of
myself....
It was an odd theme for two men to attempt after dinner, servants
hovering about them, their two faces a little flushed by wine and good
eating, their keen interest masked from the others around them by a
gossiping affectation, their hands going out as they talked for matches
or cigarette, and before we had gone further than to fling out a few
intimations to each other our colloquy was interrupted by our host
standing up and by the general stir that preluded our return to feminine
society. "We've got more to say than this," said Gidding. "We've got to
_talk_." He brought out a little engagement book that at once drew out
mine in response. And a couple of days after, we spent a morning and
afternoon together and got down to some very intimate conversation. We
motored out to lunch at a place called Nyack, above the Palisades, we
crossed on a ferry to reach it, and we visited the house of Washington
Irving near Yonkers on our way.
I've still a vivid picture in my mind of the little lawn at Irvington
that looks out upon the rushing steel of Hudson River, where Gidding
opened his heart to me. I can see him now as he leant a little forward
over the table, with his wrists resting upon it, his long clean-shaven
face very solemn and earnest and grey against the hard American sunlight
in the greenery about us, while he told me in that deliberate American
voice of his and with the deliberate American solemnity, of his desire
to "do some decent thing with life."
He was very anxious to set himself completely before me, I remember, on
that occasion. There was a peculiar mental kinship between us that even
the profound differences of our English and American trainings could not
mask. And now he told me almost everything material about his life. For
the first time I learnt how enormously rich he was, not only by reason
of his father's acquisitions, but also because of his own almost
instinctive aptitude for business. "I've got," he said, "to begin with,
what almost all men spend their whole lives in trying to get. And it
amounts to nothing. It leaves me with life like a blank sheet of paper,
and nothing in particular to write on it."
"You know," he said, "it's--exasperating. I'm already half-way to
three-score and ten, and I'm still wandering about wondering what to do
with this piece of life God has given me...."
He had "lived" as people say, he had been in scrapes and scandals,
tasted to the full the bitter intensities of the personal life; he had
come by a different route to the same conclusions as myself, was as
anxious as I to escape from memories and associations and feuds and that
excessive vividness of individual feeling which blinds us to the common
humanity, the common interest, the gentler, larger reality, which lies
behind each tawdrily emphatic self....
"It's a sort of inverted homoeopathy I want," he said. "The big thing to
cure the little thing...."
But I will say no more of that side of our friendship, because the ideas
of it are spread all through this book from the first page to the
last.... What concerns me now is not our sympathy and agreement, but
that other aspect of our relations in which Gidding becomes impulse and
urgency. "Seeing we have these ideas," said he,--"and mind you there
must be others who have them or are getting to them, for nobody thinks
all alone in this world,--seeing we have these ideas what are we going
to _do_?"
§ 10
That meeting was followed by another before I left New York, and
presently Gidding joined me at Denver, where I was trying to measure the
true significance of a labor paper called _The Appeal to Reason_ that,
in spite of a rigid boycott by the ordinary agencies for news
distribution went out in the middle west to nearly half a million
subscribers, and was filled with such a fierceness of insurrection
against labor conditions, such a hatred, blind and impassioned, as I had
never known before. Gidding remained with me there and came back with me
to Chicago, where I wanted to see something of the Americanization of
the immigrant, and my survey of America, the social and economic problem
of America, resolved itself more and more into a conference with him.
There is no more fruitless thing in the world than to speculate how life
would have gone if this thing or that had not happened. Yet I cannot
help but wonder how far I might have travelled along the lines of my
present work if I had gone to America and not met Gidding, or if I had
met him without visiting America. The man and his country are
inextricably interwoven in my mind. Yet I do think that his simplicity
and directness, his force of initiative that turned me from a mere
enquirer into an active writer and organizer, are qualities less his in
particular than America's in general. There is in America a splendid
crudity, a directness that cleared my spirit as a bracing wind will
sweep the clouds from mountain scenery. Compared with our older
continents America is mankind stripped for achievement. So many things
are not there at all, need not be considered; no institutional
aristocracy, no Kaisers, Czars, nor King-Emperors to maintain a
litigious sequel to the Empire of Rome; it has no uneducated immovable
peasantry rooted to the soil, indeed it has no rooting to the soil at
all; it is, from the Forty-ninth Parallel to the tip of Cape Horn, one
triumphant embodiment of freedom and deliberate agreement. For I mean
all America, Spanish-speaking as well as English-speaking; they have
this detachment from tradition in common. See how the United States, for
example, stands flatly on that bare piece of eighteenth-century
intellectualism the Constitution, and is by virtue of that a structure
either wilful and intellectual or absurd. That sense of incurable
servitude to fate and past traditions, that encumbrance with ruins,
pledges, laws and ancient institutions, that perpetual complication of
considerations and those haunting memories of preceding human failures
which dwarf the courage of destiny in Europe and Asia, vanish from the
mind within a week of one's arrival in the New World. Naturally one
begins to do things. One is inspired to do things. One feels that one
has escaped, one feels that the time is _now_. All America, North and
South alike, is one tremendous escape from ancient obsessions into
activity and making.
And by the time I had reached America I had already come to see that
just as the issues of party politics at home and international politics
abroad are mere superficialities above the greater struggle of an
energetic minority to organize and exploit the labor of the masses of
mankind, so that struggle also is only a huge incident in the still more
than half unconscious impulse to replace the ancient way of human living
by a more highly organized world-wide social order, by a world
civilization embodying itself in a World State. And I saw now how that
impulse could neither cease nor could it on the other hand realize
itself until it became conscious and deliberate and merciful, free from
haste and tyranny, persuasive and sustained by a nearly universal
sympathy and understanding. For until that arrives the creative forces
must inevitably spend themselves very largely in blind alleys, futile
rushes and destructive conflicts. Upon that our two minds were agreed.
"We have," said Gidding, "to understand and make understanding. That is
the real work for us to do, Stratton, that is our job. The world, as you
say, has been floundering about, half making civilization and never
achieving it. Now _we_, I don't mean just you and me, Stratton,
particularly, but every intelligent man among us, have got to set to and
make it thorough. There is no other sane policy for a man outside his
private passions but that. So let's get at it----"
I find it now impossible to trace the phases by which I reached these
broad ideas upon which I rest all my work, but certainly they were
present very early in my discussions with Gidding. We two men had been
thinking independently but very similarly, and it is hard to say just
what completing touches either of us gave to the other's propositions.
We found ourselves rather than arrived at the conception of ourselves
as the citizens neither of the United States nor of England but of a
state that had still to come into being, a World State, a great unity
behind and embracing the ostensible political fabrics of to-day--a unity
to be reached by weakening antagonisms, by developing understandings and
toleration, by fostering the sense of brotherhood across the ancient
bounds.
We believed and we believe that such a creative conception of a human
commonweal can be fostered in exactly the same way that the idea of
German unity was fostered behind the dukedoms, the free cities and
kingdoms of Germany, a conception so creative that it can dissolve
traditional hatreds, incorporate narrower loyalties and replace a
thousand suspicions and hostilities by a common passion for collective
achievement, so creative that at last the national boundaries of to-day
may become obstacles as trivial to the amplifying good-will of men as
the imaginary line that severs Normandy from Brittany, or Berwick from
Northumberland.
And it is not only a great peace about the earth that this idea of a
World State means for us, but social justice also. We are both convinced
altogether that there survives no reason for lives of toil, for
hardship, poverty, famine, infectious disease, for the continuing
cruelties of wild beasts and the greater multitude of crimes, but
mismanagement and waste, and that mismanagement and waste spring from no
other source than ignorance and from stupid divisions and jealousies,
base patriotisms, fanaticisms, prejudices and suspicions that are all no
more than ignorance a little mingled with viciousness. We have looked
closely into this servitude of modern labor, we have seen its injustice
fester towards syndicalism and revolutionary socialism, and we know
these things for the mere aimless, ignorant resentments they are;
punishments, not remedies. We have looked into the portentous threat of
modern war, and it is ignorant vanity and ignorant suspicion, the
bargaining aggression of the British prosperous and the swaggering
vulgarity of the German junker that make and sustain that monstrous
European devotion to arms. And we are convinced there is nothing in
these evils and conflicts that light may not dispel. We believe that
these things can be dispelled, that the great universals, Science which
has limitations neither of race nor class, Art which speaks to its own
in every rank and nation, Philosophy and Literature which broaden
sympathy and banish prejudice, can flood and submerge and will yet flow
over and submerge every one of these separations between man and man.
I will not say that this Great State, this World Republic of civilized
men, is our dream, because it is not a dream, it is a manifestly
reasonable possibility. It is our intention. It is what we are
deliberately making and what in a little while very many men and women
will be making. We are secessionists from all contemporary nationalities
and loyalties. We have set ourselves with all the capacity and energy at
our disposal to create a world-wide common fund of ideas and knowledge,
and to evoke a world-wide sense of human solidarity in which the
existing limitations of political structure must inevitably melt away.
It was Gidding and his Americanism, his inborn predisposition to
innovation and the large freedom of his wealth that turned these ideas
into immediate concrete undertakings. I see more and more that it is
here that we of the old European stocks, who still grow upon the old
wood, differ most from those vigorous grafts of our race in America and
Africa and Australia on the one hand and from the renascent peoples of
the East on the other: that we have lost the courage of youth and have
not yet gained the courage of desperate humiliations, in taking hold of
things. To Gidding it was neither preposterous nor insufferably
magnificent that we should set about a propaganda of all science, all
knowledge, all philosophical and political ideas, round about the
habitable globe. His mind began producing concrete projects as a
fire-work being lit produces sparks, and soon he was "figuring out" the
most colossal of printing and publishing projects, as a man might work
out the particulars for an alteration to his bathroom. It was so
entirely natural to him, it was so entirely novel to me, to go on from
the proposition that understanding was the primary need of humanity to
the systematic organization of free publishing, exhaustive discussion,
intellectual stimulation. He set about it as a company of pharmacists
might organize the distribution of some beneficial cure.
"Say, Stratton," he said, after a conversation that had seemed to me
half fantasy; "Let's _do_ it."
There are moments still when it seems to me that this life of mine has
become the most preposterous of adventures. We two absurd human beings
are spending our days and nights in a sustained and growing attempt to
do what? To destroy certain obsessions and to give the universal human
mind a form and a desire for expression. We have put into the shape of
one comprehensive project that force of released wealth that has already
dotted America with universities, libraries, institutions for research
and enquiry. Already there are others at work with us, and presently
there will be a great number. We have started an avalanche above the old
politics and it gathers mass and pace....
And there never was an impulse towards endeavor in a human heart that
wasn't preposterous. Man is a preposterous animal. Thereby he ceases to
be a creature and becomes a creator, he turns upon the powers that made
him and subdues them to his service; by his sheer impudence he
establishes his claim to possess a soul....
But I need not write at all fully of my work here. This book is not
about that but about my coming to that. Long before this manuscript
reaches your hands--if ultimately I decide that it shall reach your
hands--you will be taking your share, I hope, in this open conspiracy
against potentates and prejudices and all the separating powers of
darkness.
§ 11
I would if I could omit one thing that I must tell you here, because it
goes so close to the very core of all this book has to convey. I wish I
could leave it out altogether. I wish I could simplify my story by
smoothing out this wrinkle at least and obliterating a thing that was at
once very real and very ugly. You see I had at last struggled up to a
sustaining idea, to a conception of work and duty to which I could
surely give my life. I had escaped from my pit so far. And it was
natural that now with something to give I should turn not merely for
consolation and service but for help and fellowship to that dear human
being across the seas who had offered them to me so straightly and
sweetly. All that is brave and good and as you would have me, is it not?
Only, dear son, that is not all the truth.
There was still in my mind, for long it remained in my mind, a
bitterness against Mary. I had left her, I had lost her, we had parted;
but from Germany to America and all through America and home again to my
marriage and with me after my marriage, it rankled that she could still
go on living a life independent of mine. I had not yet lost my desire to
possess her, to pervade and dominate her existence; my resentment that
though she loved me she had first not married me and afterwards not
consented to come away with me was smouldering under the closed hatches
of my mind. And so while the better part of me was laying hold of this
work because it gave me the hope of a complete distraction and escape
from my narrow and jealous self, that lower being of the pit was also
rejoicing in the great enterprises before me and in the marriage upon
which I had now determined, because it was a last trampling upon my
devotion to Mary, because it defied and denied some lurking claims to
empire I could suspect in her. I want to tell you that particularly
because so I am made, so you are made, so most of us are made. There is
scarcely a high purpose in all the world that has no dwarfish footman at
its stirrup, no base intention over which there does not ride at least
the phantom of an angel.
Constantly in those days, it seems to me now, I was haunted by my own
imagination of Mary amiably reconciled to Justin, bearing him children,
forgetful of or repudiating all the sweetness, all the wonder and beauty
we had shared.... It was an unjust and ungenerous conception, I knew it
for a caricature even as I entertained it, and yet it tormented me. It
stung me like a spur. It kept me at work, and if I strayed into
indolence brought me back to work with a mind galled and bleeding....
§ 12
And I suppose it is mixed up with all this that I could not make love
easily and naturally to Rachel. I could not write love-letters to her.
There is a burlesque quality in these scruples, I know, seeing that I
was now resolved to marry her, but that is the quality, that is the
mixed texture of life. We overcome the greater things and are
conscience-stricken by the details.
I wouldn't, even at the price of losing her--and I was now passionately
anxious not to lose her--use a single phrase of endearment that did not
come out of me almost in spite of myself. At any rate I would not cheat
her. And my offer of marriage when at last I sent it to her from Chicago
was, as I remember it, almost business-like. I atoned soon enough for
that arid letter in ten thousand sweet words that came of themselves to
my lips. And she paid me at any rate in my own coin when she sent me her
answer by cable, the one word "Yes."
And indeed I was already in love with her long before I wrote. It was
only a dread of giving her a single undeserved cheapness that had held
me back so long. It was that and the perplexity that Mary still gripped
my feelings; my old love for her was there in my heart in spite of my
new passion for Rachel, it was blackened perhaps and ruined and changed
but it was there. It was as if a new crater burnt now in the ampler
circumference of an old volcano, which showed all the more desolate and
sorrowful and obsolete for the warm light of the new flames....
How impatiently I came home! Thoughts of England I had not dared to
think for three long years might now do what they would in me. I dreamt
of the Surrey Hills and the great woods of Burnmore Park, of the
changing skies and stirring soft winds of our grey green Motherland.
There was fog in the Irish Sea, and we lost the better part of a day
hooting our way towards Liverpool while I fretted about the ship with
all my luggage packed, staring at the grey waters that weltered under
the mist. It was the longest day in my life. My heart was full of
desire, my eyes ached for the little fields and golden October skies of
England, England that was waiting to welcome me back from my exile with
such open arms. I was coming home,--home.
I hurried through London into Surrey and in my father's study, warned by
a telegram, I found a bright-eyed, resolute young woman awaiting me,
with the quality about her of one who embarks upon a long premeditated
adventure. And I found too a family her sisters and her brother all
gladly ready for me, my father too was a happy man, and on the eighth of
November in 1906 Rachel and I were married in the little church at
Shere. We stayed for a week or so in Hampshire near Ringwood, the season
was late that year and the trees still very beautiful; and then we went
to Portofino on the Ligurian coast.
There presently Gidding joined us and we began to work out the schemes
we had made in America, the schemes that now fill my life.